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122 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
122 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
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[#]: collector: (lujun9972)
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[#]: translator: ( )
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[#]: reviewer: ( )
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[#]: publisher: ( )
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[#]: url: ( )
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[#]: subject: (An attempt to make a font look more handwritten)
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[#]: via: (https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/08/08/handwritten-font/)
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[#]: author: (Julia Evans https://jvns.ca/)
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An attempt to make a font look more handwritten
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======
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I’m actually not super happy with the results of this experiment, but I wanted to share it anyway because it was very easy and fun to play with fonts. And somebody asked me how to do it and I told her I’d write a blog post about it :)
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### background: the original handwritten font
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Some background: I have a font of my handwriting that I’ve been use in my zines for a couple of years. I made it using a delightful app called [iFontMaker][1]. They pitch themselves on their website as “You can create your handmade typeface in less than 5 minutes just with your fingers”. In my experience the ‘5 minutes” part is pretty accurate – I might have spent more like 15 minutes. I’m skeptical of the “just your fingers” claim – I used an Apple Pencil, which has much better accuracy. But it is extremely easy to make a TTF font of your handwriting with the app and if you happen to already have an Apple Pencil and iPad I think it’s a fun way to spend $7.99.
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Here’s what my font looks like. The “CONNECT” text on the left is my actual handwriting, and the paragraph on the right is the font. There are actually 2 fonts – there’s a regular font and a handwritten “monospace” font. (which actually isn’t monospace in practice, I haven’t figured out how to make a actual monospace font in iFontMaker)
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![][2]
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### the goal: have more character variation in the font
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In the screenshot above, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a font and not actual handwriting. It’s easiest to see this when you have two of the same letter next to each other, like in “HTTP’.
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So I thought it might be fun to use some OpenType features to somehow introduce a little more variation into this font, like maybe the two Ts could be different. I didn’t know how to do this though!
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### idea from Tristan Hume: use OpenType!
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Then I was at !!Con 2020 in May (all the [talk recordings are here!][3]) and saw this talk by Tristan Hume about using OpenType to place commas in big numbers by using a special font. His talk and blog post are both great so here are a bunch of links – the live demo is maybe the fastest way to see his results.
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* a live demo: [Numderline Test][4]
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* the blog post: [Commas in big numbers everywhere: An OpenType adventure][5]
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* the talk: [!!Con 2020 - Using font shaping to put commas in big numbers EVERYWHERE!! by Tristan Hume][6]
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* the github repo: <https://github.com/trishume/numderline/blob/master/patcher.py>
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### the main idea: OpenType lets you replace characters based on context
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I started out being extremely confused about what OpenType even is. I still don’t know much, but I learned that you can write extremely simple OpenType rules to change how a font looks, and you don’t even have to really understand anything about fonts.
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Here’s an example rule:
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```
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sub a' b by other_a;
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```
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What `sub a' b by other_a;` means is: If an `a` glyph is before a `b`, then replace the `a` with the glyph `other_a`.
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So this means I can make `ab` appear different from `ac` in the font. It’s not random the way handwriting is, but it does introduce a little bit of variation.
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### OpenType reference documentation: awesome
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The best documentation I found for OpenType was this [OpenType™ Feature File Specification][7] reference. There are a lot of examples of cool things you can do in there, like replace “ffi” with a ligature.
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### how to apply these rules: `fonttools`
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Adding new OpenType rules to a font is extremely easy. There’s a Python library called `fonttools`, and these 5 lines of code will apply a list of OpenType rules (in `rules.fea`) to the font file `input.ttf`.
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```
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from fontTools.ttLib import TTFont
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from fontTools.feaLib.builder import addOpenTypeFeatures
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ft_font = TTFont('input.ttf')
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addOpenTypeFeatures(ft_font, 'rules.fea', tables=['GSUB'])
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ft_font.save('output.ttf')
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```
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`fontTools` also provides a couple of command line tools called `ttx` and `fonttools`. `ttx` converts a TTF font into an XML file, which was useful to me because I wanted to rename some glyphs in my font but did not understand anything about fonts. So I just converted my font into an XML file, used `sed` to rename the glyphs, and then used `ttx` again to convert the XML file back into a `ttf`.
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`fonttools merge` let me merge my 3 handwriting fonts into 1 so that I had all the glyphs I needed in 1 file.
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### the code
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I put my extremely hacky code for doing this in a repository called [font-mixer][8]. It’s like 33 lines of code and I think it’s pretty straightforward. (it’s all in `run.sh` and `combine.py`)
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### the results
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Here’s a small sample the old font and the new font. I don’t think the new font “feels” that much more like handwriting – there’s a little more variation, but it still doesn’t compare to actual handwritten text (at the bottom).
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It feels a little uncanny valley to me, like it’s obviously still a font but it’s pretending to be something else.
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![][9]
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And here’s a sample of the same text actually written by hand:
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![][10]
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It’s possible that the results would be better if I was more careful about how I made the 2 other handwriting fonts I mixed the original font with.
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### it’s cool that it’s so easy to add opentype rules!
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Mostly what was delightful to me here is that it’s so easy to add OpenType rules to change how fonts work, like you can pretty easily make a font where the word “the” is always replaced with “teh” (typos all the time!).
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I still don’t know how to make a more realistic handwriting font though :). I’m still using the old one (without the extra variations) and I’m pretty happy with it.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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via: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/08/08/handwritten-font/
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作者：[Julia Evans][a]
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选题：[lujun9972][b]
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译者：[译者ID](https://github.com/译者ID)
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校对：[校对者ID](https://github.com/校对者ID)
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本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译，[Linux中国](https://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出
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[a]: https://jvns.ca/
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[b]: https://github.com/lujun9972
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[1]: https://2ttf.com/
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[2]: https://jvns.ca/images/font-sample-connect.png
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[3]: http://bangbangcon.com/recordings.html
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[4]: https://thume.ca/numderline/
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[5]: https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere/
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[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biqm9ndNyC8
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[7]: https://adobe-type-tools.github.io/afdko/OpenTypeFeatureFileSpecification.html
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[8]: https://github.com/jvns/font-mixer/
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[9]: https://jvns.ca/images/font-mixer-comparison.png
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[10]: https://jvns.ca/images/handwriting-sample.jpeg
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